Power Mostly Restored To South Mpls. After Outage On Subzero Night

MINNEAPOLIS (AP/WCCO) — Power has been restored to thousands of residents in south Minneapolis who lost service over the weekend. With temperatures below zero degrees, crews are racing to restore service to those who are still in the dark.

The Xcel Energy website says about 81 customers are still without power Monday as of 11:10 a.m. Xcel has brought the number of outages down to 12.

About 4,600 people in the south Minneapolis area lost power Sunday about 8 p.m. Most of them had service restored within three hours, but about 1,400 were still without power about midnight.

The largest areas affected south of East 38th Street to the east and west of Hiawatha Avenue.

Xcel said it was equipment failure that lead to the power outage.

They say it took so long to restore because the nature of the equipment failure in some areas meant they had a lot of individual homes to deal with.

Meteorologist Matt Brickman said the silver lining is that the winds are not a factor Monday morning, as they were in the past. Still, overnight lows reached -11 degrees at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Elsewhere in the state, lows overnight plunged to more than 30 degrees below zero in Hibbing, Ely, Eveleth and International Falls. Embarass, Minn. once again hung its head in shame as temperatures there dipped to -40 degrees.